Discipline Helped Carve Path to Senate

Mindful of his athletic benchmarks, Scott Brown is fiercely competitive. “I treated this campaign like a sprint triathlon,” he said.Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Scott Brown lives by what he calls “Army values,” instilled 30 years ago when he joined the Massachusetts National Guard. “The most regimented person I know,” his oldest daughter calls the Republican politician, who abhors disorder while sometimes inviting it with audacious pursuits — whether jumping into frigid lakes at 5 a.m. (for triathlon training) or into a seemingly quixotic Senate race.

“I treated this campaign like a sprint triathlon,” Mr. Brown said in an interview Wednesday. “You have to be good in everything, 18, 19 hours a day. We were just out there cranking.”

“Just out there cranking” could be a mantra of a man quick to boast of his athletic accomplishments and confident enough to challenge President Obama — who had called to congratulate him Tuesday night — to a basketball game. He strives for “total discipline” but can be prone to curious public statements (declaring his 19- and 21- year-old daughters “available” in his victory speech ); he has fashioned a “nice guy” image while sometimes offending ( saying, for instance, in 2001 that lesbians having children was “not normal”).

Scott Philip Brown, 50, is the unlikely successor to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the possibly fatal agent of Mr. Obama’s health care bill and the protagonist in of one of the great political upsets in recent memory. ( Mr. Obama’s top political aide, David Axelrod, praised Mr. Brown’s campaign as “spectacular.”) Mr. Brown was even asked at a news conference in Boston on Wednesday whether he would consider running for president. (He demurred.)

While pundits of both parties were ascribing his victory to discontent over the economy and a radical shift in the nation’s political mood since the 2008 election, Mr. Brown has dutifully separated himself from any grand cause. By Wednesday he seemed eager to put the symbolism of his win behind him.

“All eyes are going to be on me; I’m not stupid,” Mr. Brown said in the interview. “I get it. And I’m going to make sure I’m going to be the best senator I can possibly be.”

Mr. Brown’s craving for discipline and order was born of a chaotic childhood. His parents were divorced when he was 1, and each one was married four times. He lived for a time with his grandparents and dealt with an ever-changing cast of stepparents.

“Some of these marriages were not that pretty,” said John Encarnaceo, a retired colonel in the Massachusetts National Guard and former boyfriend of Mr. Brown’s mother, Judith Brown.

“I grew up fast,” Mr. Brown recalled. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and hearing the banging and the screams and having to be the 5- or 6-year-old boy having to save Mom.”

He grew his hair long, listened to Aerosmith and Kiss and, at 12, was arrested for shoplifting a bunch of albums (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Grand Funk Railroad) at a local mall.

Photo

Republican Scott Brown at a press conference at The Boston Park Plaza Hotel in Boston on Wednesday.Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

He went before a judge, Samuel Zoll, who invited him into his chambers and asked him about his life. Mr. Brown responded by saying he loved basketball and had younger half siblings who looked up to him. “How do you think they would like to watch you play basketball in jail?” the judge asked, according to Mr. Brown’s telling. Judge Zoll demanded that Mr. Brown write a 1,500-word essay about the episode and eventually let him go.

Mr. Brown said that experience was a pivot point in his life, leading him to be more serious about school and sports. His long-range shooting skill at Wakefield High School and, eventually, Tufts University, earned him the nickname Downtown Scotty Brown.

He joined the National Guard at 20, in part to help pay for law school at Boston College. He was drawn to the Guard during an epic blizzard in 1978 that dumped more than three feet of snow on eastern Massachusetts and left motorists stranded on local highways — requiring an all-out rescue effort. Mr. Brown has been deployed in areas as far-flung as Paraguay and Kazakhstan, though never in a combat zone.

Fiercely competitive, he is ever mindful of his Guard ranking (lieutenant colonel) and athletic benchmarks (“I made All-America this year in triathlon,” he noted).

That ambition may help explain his political rise. While Mr. Brown runs a small law practice out of his home in Wrentham, in the Boston suburbs, he ran for town assessor after he felt slighted by a town official in 1992. He won his State Senate seat in 2004 in a special election.

Mr. Brown was considered a relatively conservative Republican in the Legislature, which would place him closer to the center among Senate Republicans in Washington.

Mr. Brown has tried to project a more conciliatory image even while unloading criticism on the state “Democratic machine” and being embraced by many conservative hardliners across the country. He sprinkles his sentences with “sirs” and “ma’ams” and “with all due respects.” He has been generous in praising Mr. Kennedy and said the first person he called after his victory Tuesday night was Mr. Kennedy’s widow, Victoria.

He is also confident, which would seem a prerequisite for anyone who poses for Cosmopolitan magazine in his birthday suit (as Mr. Brown did when he was 22). And he is at times superstitious, carrying good luck stones in his pocket, according to his daughter Ayla, and calling everyone he knew on Election Day to remind them to vote. When the president called to congratulate him Tuesday night, Mr. Brown challenged him to a game of two-on-two hoops: he and Ayla, a senior forward on the Boston College basketball team, against the president and a player of his choosing.

In a phone interview Wednesday, Ms. Brown — the older of the two “available” daughters — confirmed that she is single. (By Wednesday morning, she said she had 1,080 new friend requests on her Facebook page and 285 new messages in her Facebook inbox, “most of them from guys.”)

Ayla sang on “American Idol” and Mr. Brown’s wife of 23 years, Gail Huff, is a longtime reporter at WCVB-TV, the Boston ABC affiliate.

“I am the third most famous member of my family,” Mr. Brown used to joke, but not anymore.

A version of this article appears in print on January 21, 2010, on page A27 of the National edition with the headline: For Kennedy’s Republican Successor, Discipline Helped Carve Path to Senate. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe